Chamois-hunting, the sporting specialty of the Swiss and the Tyrolese, appears to be dying out.  The hunter of our day keeps it up rather as a tradition than as a practical pursuit.  He rarely bags a “goat,” for goats are very few to bag, and those few even more supernaturally fleet and sure of foot and keen of nose than their less-hunted ancestors.  Still, somewhere in that upper world of lilac-white that melts into the clouds in vast but distance-softened chasms of viscid ice and rifts of gray gneiss, there is an object for him.  In some nook or on some crag of the square leagues of desert that swell around him a troop of the desiderated ruminants is grazing, if grazing it can be called where grass is none.  He is very sure of that.  Even from the door of his chalet he scans the slopes in the half hope of detecting a flock or a single goat.  His father and his grandfather before him had looked forth from the same door on the same scene, snuffed the same “caller air,” mentally shaped the same pretext for yielding to the same spirit of adventure begotten of the peaks and by going forth to battle with the solitude, and hunted patiently, sometimes with success, oftener without, the progenitors of the same quarry.  So he prepares himself anew for the wild and perilous tramp.  A day—­two or three days—­may pass without the compassing of a shot, or even hearing the whistle of the sentinel goat as he shrills the alarm far out of range and leads his fellows in twenty minutes to crags the hunter cannot reach in as many hours.  Death crouches in the treacherous snow-crust beneath or the poised avalanche above.  A false step or an inch’s miscalculation of leap may make him a waif for the laemmergeier or land him among the buried villages of the last century.  He toils on until success or starvation sends him home.  In the former case he out-generals his shy game after a series of manoeuvres to which the deepest stratagems of our Indians are straightforwardness personified.  He gets a long shot at a distance that would make the musket or buckshot as useless as a sabre.  The certainty may be apparent that the animal, if hit mortally, must fall some hundreds of feet, perhaps into an inaccessible chasm.  There is no help for that.  Now or never!  The short rifle, assisted by a portable rest, is called on for its best.  The concentrated energy of the whole chase is thrown into the long and carefully calculated aim.  A thin spurt of white smoke jets forth; a sharp report echoes “from peak to peak the rattling crags among;” half a dozen chamois whisk around the next rock-buttress, and “one more unfortunate” tumbles from the verge into vacancy.  The labor of days is rewarded.  Securing the scanty venison if he can, the hunter is off for his hillside burrow, advertising his approach by an exultant jodel of extra nerve-splitting power.